roses & thorns, and standing stones
by qqueenofhades
Summary: Modern AU. At Oxford University in 1965, Sansa Stark, daughter of a disgraced English noble family, meets Willas Tyrell, son of a wealthy shipping tycoon. An attraction is formed, and an education begun, in more ways than one. SansaxWillas, some JaimexBrienne.


**I.**

Sansa Stark arrives at Somerville College on one of those late-summer English afternoons when the light is pure hammered gold and the sun doesn't set for hours, in the back seat of a large black Duesenberg driven by the family butler Jory, all her worldly possessions packed into two portmanteaus and her lace-gloved hands clenched firmly in her lap to stop them shaking. Up ahead, she can see girls in fashionable headscarves, red lipstick and marquee-idol sunglasses, girls in preppy skirts and and a daring few in slacks and culottes, carrying boxes up the steps of Somerville's sedate brick halls and chatting with their friends. To Sansa's eye, they all look impossibly pretty, impossibly accomplished, probably speak French and play the piano beautifully, and while she spent a few summers in Normandy and has fingers still callused from years of lessons, she feels, at this moment, utterly insignificant. Her hand goes up again nervously to touch the double string of pearls around her neck. At least she won't look as out of place as she desperately feels.

Sansa is eighteen, the eldest daughter of Eddard Stark, who is — or was, anyway — the patriarch of an ancient and noble English family, holder of Winterfell Castle in Northumbria almost back to the Conquest. But Stark made himself deeply unpopular in the serried halls of British power, and particularly the House of Lords. There have long been whispers of _scandale_, the sort conducted in genteel parlors and smoky back rooms of gentlemen's clubs on Pall Mall, and after Edward VIII's abdication to marry his divorced American mistress, there was a decades-long effort by Lord Eddard's enemies to link him to their suspected Nazi sympathies. Even after the war ended, and Great Britain and America plunged headlong into a new fight with communism, Eddard Stark refused to keep quiet. One thing led to another, and he died six years ago in suspicious circumstances in a Soviet military prison. All of his family's efforts to find out more, to obtain information or an official pardon from Downing Street, have been curtly rebuffed, with the intimation that they won't ask again if they know what's good for them.

Hence Sansa is here, the daughter of a disgraced suspected traitor, in Oxford, hoping to complete her schooling and not be noticed. It took her quite a bit of persuasion to even be allowed to go, as she was already considered suitably "finished" and was instead expected to make a socially prestigious match with a scion of the sherry-and-sweater-set club. Marry a good English man from a good English family, and let all shadow of doubt over the family's loyalty be removed — no idle threat, in a war as cold as this one. But proper as he might have been, captain of the Boat Club and already accepted to read law at Cambridge and heir to one of the largest ancestral fortunes in the country, there was no way that Joffrey Baratheon was anything but a monster.

A shiver runs through Sansa at the memory, as the car rolls to a halt and Jory gets the door for her. Joffrey's enrollment at Cambridge was a key factor in her deciding on Oxford instead. She hasn't had real bruises in months, thank God, but sometimes she can still feel their shadows. But she steps out, ascends the stairs to her third-floor room, Jory huffing behind her with the portmanteaus, and removes the key acquired from the lodge, intending to unlock the door. It's only then that she realizes it's already open.

Jaunty, soulful music drifts from inside, the newfangled rock n' roll — that one band from Liverpool, Sansa thinks, something or other to do with insects. The beetles? It seems her roommate is already in residence, a notion confirmed when she pushes the door the rest of the way open with one heeled shoe and sees a beautiful brown-haired girl unpacking her things, clicking her fingers and swaying in time to the beat. Nor does she stop upon seeing them, but waves a hand, graciously inviting them in. "Good afternoon, darling! You must be Sansa. It's groovy to meet you. I'm Margaery."

"Ah — yes, yes I am." Sansa manages to recover herself, glancing around the room they are expected to share for the next three terms. It's very modern, at least in decor, though the ceilings are high and the old floors creak underfoot. She had her own room in Winterfell, once she begged Mother that she simply couldn't share with Arya anymore. Her wild little sister is another reason it is ever more important for her to read something ladylike such as poetry or music, the kind of thing she can chat about over afternoon tea. Arya ran off with some rough coal boy nearly ten years older than her, Gendry Waters, to Newcastle. There are rumors that she's mixed up in organizing the labor strikes, as the miners and the government fight each other. More than once, the widowed Lady Catelyn has written discreetly to the papers, begging them to keep her younger daughter's name out of the news. She's sent cheques too, plenty of them.

Looking at Margaery now, therefore, Sansa can almost hope that she will finally have a sister she can really understand. Margaery wears perfume and has perfectly marcelled brown curls and though she speaks with a posh London accent (Sansa's own slight Northern burr has been assaulted by expensive private tutors until she too speaks like a BBC newsreader) she keeps throwing in euphemisms and strange American slang. She says she's been to New York three times, she simply must take Sansa to Broadway or Carnegie Hall, it's _divine_. She is everything Sansa is not, in short, and that thrills and terrifies her.

Jory dutifully helps unpack and make sure she is settled in, hauls up the new typewriter that Sansa bought, and finally bids her adieu. She should just cordially see him out, but she's known him since she was a baby, and she startles them both by hugging him hard. He holds her tightly for a moment, then steps back, says, "See you at the holidays then, Miss Stark," and leaves.

And so, thus, begins her career as a college girl.

* * *

The start-of-term dinner that night is Sansa's first Event, and to avoid looking completely declasse, she just follows Margaery's lead in everything. The Great Hall is adrift in a sea of china, crystal, and candlelight, the faculty is in _sub fusc_, and the young ladies are in evening dresses with gloves, some with their hair in classical chignons and others with bouffant updos, mingling and sizing each other up behind decorous debutante smiles. Sansa finds herself at a table with Dany, an elegant, queenly blonde reading PPE, and Arianne, who is from Cordoba in Spain and to judge by the look in her dark eyes, doesn't think much of this pale, foggy island with its pale, fussy people. Nonetheless, they make mannerly conversation over the four-course meal, Sansa living in fear that she will accidentally dribble soup down her chin, until the Warden of the College, the Right Honourable Sir Jaime Lannister, KBE, gets up to offer a few remarks.

Sansa watches him closely, as he is plenty notorious in his own right. He was a war hero in D-Day twenty-one years ago, in which he lost his right hand, and moreover he is the eldest son of Tywin Lannister, Earl of Wessex, who nearly solely financed Britain's civilian sector through both world wars and at the age of well past seventy has lost neither his talent for inspiring terror in everyone nor his bitter hatred of his country's enemies — his name was bandied about, though never proven, as part of the cabal that took down Eddard Stark for seeking to end the impasse with the Soviets. With such a distinguished pedigree, therefore, Sir Jaime should have some more exalted occupation than serving as head of a mere ladies' college. But rumors of a fatal estrangement with his formidable sire have swirled for decades, that he has turned his back on everything that would otherwise be expected of him, and thus he is here. He cuts a striking figure in his academic regalia, lean and handsome, golden hair just touched with silver and green eyes sharp and almost mocking. But when Sansa makes the mistake of wondering aloud just what the particular attraction for him here is, Arianne snorts. "He's sleeping with her, of course," she says, indicating someone at a nearby table. "Everyone knows that."

Taken aback, Sansa peers at the object of Arianne's gesture: a tall, awkward-looking young woman who, to put it kindly, looks out of place. She hunches in her blue evening gown, has shoulders like a master coxswain on the rowing team, and her straw-colored hair keeps escaping in lank wisps from its bun. Evidently her name is Brienne and she is a graduate student; the girls on either side of Sansa are openly scornful that it must be an advanced course in being a slut, as they can't imagine what would otherwise induce Sir Jaime to take a second look at her.

Sansa stumbles back to her room very late. She's drunk rather too much wine, and her head feels as light as if it is about to float off. The harvest moon is yellow as butter, rising fat and full over the dark, dreaming spires of Oxford. She feels a thousand miles and one from home.

* * *

Michaelmas Term is mostly a blur. Sansa discovers early on that the radiator in her room clanks loudly every morning, a punctual wake-up call whether she wants it or not, and hence she is usually trying desperately to bite back her yawns at her nine AM tute — which her literature teacher, Mr Luwin, either does not notice or is considerate enough not to mention. A small, elderly, gentle Welshman with a neat grey beard, he looks as if his sole purpose in life was to become an academic, with elbow-patched tweed jackets, his own private table at the Bird &amp; the Baby, and an ancient briefcase from which volumes of tidily annotated papers and yellowed paperback editions of great classics (50p at Blackwell's) are perpetually making a daring bid for freedom. The first time he returns an essay to her so heavily flogged in red ink as to make the white paper barely visible, Sansa locks herself in the loo and cries for an hour.

Gradually, however, it starts to get easier. She learns her way around the city centre on her basketed Schwinn bicycle, perpetually loaded down with a rucksack of books. The sights of her world are the narrow cobbled closes, the magnificent stone facades of the older colleges, the tawny autumn light pouring through the high windows of the Bodleian Library reading room, streetlamps in the autumn fog, the warm glow of the fire in the JCR when she tromps in cold and wet. The sounds are the bells of the University Church and the college chapels, the rustle of pages, the music and loud chatter of the Saturday night bops, the steady drum of rain, the shouts of punters on the Thames on a lazy afternoon. It smells of wet wool and old books, of tea in Queen's Lane and the distinct reek of the Perma-Strate Hair Cream Margaery uses to tame her curls; Sansa's own long, straight auburn locks need no such chemical assistance. Saddle shoes and sharpened pencils, plaid skirts, packages from home in her pigeonhole in the porter's lodge, picnics in Port Meadow, caramel apples and ghost stories on All Hallows' Eve until Sansa stays awake half the night, jumping at small noises.

There are other things to learn too. She quickly finds out the secret places where some of the girls smoke pot and do LSD, usually the ones who grow their hair long and wear granny glasses, talk ardently about the coloured people's struggle for civil rights that is ongoing in America, their illegal war in Indochina, and how Britain needs to wake up too. Other girls are bohemes and revolutionaries with the spirit of French existentialism in them, read _Le Monde _and smoke unfiltered cigarettes and talk passionately of the student movements in Paris. Sansa has never been around so many whip-smart, well-spoken, opinionated, passionate women before. It is terrifying — and unbelievably liberating.

Of course, there are also the institutional politics to navigate. Girls form close, ardent, downright romantic attachments to each other, and the fallout if they go bad is just as dramatic to deal with as the end of any liaison with a boy friend. Popular girls pick favorites and run cliques. They sled down the steps on cooking trays, invent their own rituals and take part in time-honored ones. Sansa learns not to leave her nice scents in the lavatory shared by her floor. Despite Somerville's status as a single-sex educational establishment, men are not an uncommon sight in the halls, and Sansa is well aware that on the weekends, Margaery dolls herself up and goes out with them. More than that, even; she picked up a rubber that fell out of Margaery's handbag once. She is not completely naive; she knows about the women's rights movement and that this sort of thing does happen. But she's not interested, can't bring herself to be. Her experience from Joffrey is that a kiss is just as likely to be followed by a blow, that she'd have to powder the bruise and still look like she stepped out of _Life_ magazine and stand next to him and smile at his office party, knowing that she'd pay more later for whatever she had said to make him angry. On an intellectual level, Sansa knows that this is not the same, but that makes no difference to the animal fear that grips her when she even thinks about it.

So, she stays as far away from that as she can. Doesn't even consider that there will ever be a man in her room. Until she wakes up one Sunday, and there is.

* * *

It's hard to say which of them is more aghast. She sleepily rolls over, having for once not been jolted awake by the radiator, and is about to doze for another few hours when she catches sight of the unfamiliar person — the _man_ — perched on Margaery's bed, watching her. She shrieks and pulls up the covers, and he yells and dives off it. Thus results an extremely chaotic five minutes as he struggles and hops trying to get back to his feet — he wears a clunky metal brace on his left leg, and seeing his clumsiness and evident horror, Sansa decides that either he isn't here to attempt depraved assaults on her or if he is, she can fight him off. She is just helping him up, both of them apologizing with every other breath, when Margaery rushes in, blinks, looks back and forth, and demands, "Will, what on _earth_ did you do?"

"Nothing!" the newcomer protests, pushing his horn-rimmed glasses awkwardly up his nose. He's tall, standing a head and a half over Sansa, and thin and gangling as a stork, with long limbs and big hands. He has a tousled mop of thick chestnut curls and remarkable golden eyes, unshaven in a way a lot of the men think is cool, clad in neatly pressed slacks, collared shirt, and a Merton College jumper with a loosened necktie underneath. He also has a crutch, which Margaery has just returned to him with a reproachful look. "I just — " he splutters. "Fell over."

"You scared me," Sansa says accusingly.

"I know, I'm so sorry, I'm an idiot." He runs his free hand through his hair, disheveling it further, and looks penitent. After this eventful beginning, it is divulged that he is Willas Tyrell, Margaery's eldest brother — he is twenty-six going on twenty-seven and working on his in History and Classics at Merton. He is here to take his sister to Sunday brunch and while she was getting ready, rather than subject himself to three sets of steep stairs more than necessary, was just going to sit and wait. "Polio," he explains wryly, pointing to his bad leg. "Lucky that this was all it left me with, but it does make it a bit of a chore to gad about."

"Oh, I'm — I'm so sorry," Sansa squeaks, rather mortified that she caused a cripple to fall splat on the floor. "Please forgive me, I didn't — "

He waves off her apology. "No, no, please. It's only natural that you'd be alarmed to find a shifty-looking bloke lurking about while you were trying to have a nice kip." He rubs his chin critically and turns to his sister. "Marge, I really should shave, shouldn't I?"

"No, it's _fashionable_," Margaery says firmly, in the tone of a woman who will brook no dissent. "Sansa, how about to make it up, you come to brunch with us?" She holds out an inviting hand. "I insist."

Taken aback but secretly very pleased, Sansa graciously accepts and hurries to dress herself. She chooses something nice: a slim, high-waisted houndstooth skirt, an ivory-silk blouse with a brooch, pantyhose and heeled pumps, a peacoat and pearl-drop earrings, lipstick and a hint of rouge, and a scarf that sets off her blue eyes. She tells herself that it's just because she doesn't want to look like a tramp next to the stylish Tyrell siblings, but she is instantly conscious of Willas' briefly drop-jawed appreciation when she appears, turning and preening and demurely lowering her lashes. She picks up her handbag and brolly and follows them out.

Willas drives a little green Citroen that he gallantly offers the front seat of to Sansa, making Margaery crawl into the boot. They putter down Woodstock Road and through city centre to St Aldates, where they find a cafe in the maze of little side streets that border Christ Church. Oxford is undergoing a burst of renovation, as new colleges are founded and boxy modern architecture springs up alongside ancient stone, and the morning dailies are full of affronted aesthetes complaining about the irreparable damage being done to this beautiful, historic place by these "loathingly outsized oblongs of cement excrescence," as Willas reads off one of the editorials with a raised eyebrow. "What did they think we were going to do, haul Sir Christopher Wren out of the tomb and make him have another go?"

They sip tea, nibble scones and crumpets, and chat about their studies, and Willas makes Margaery and Sansa giggle uncontrollably by reciting rude poetry from ancient Rome in the original Latin, and then providing his own quite colorful translations. They keep hissing at him to be quieter, as an elderly don and his wife are glaring at them from a nearby table, but this only encourages him, whereas the don clearly cannot decide whether to commend Willas for his linguistic skills or reprimand him for his subject matter. Finally Margaery smacks her brother in the arm and says, "Oh, hush. You're just showing off for Sansa."

Willas looks slightly too innocent at this suggestion, while Sansa laughs and then blushes. She asks what Willas intends to do after he defends his dissertation (an exploration of the function of the supernatural and faeries in Victorian literature of the Industrial Revolution); he intends in fact to be a professor, being unsuited for rambunctious physical activity and of a voraciously bookish temperament. "After all," he says, dryly but with more than a hint of sharp self-deprecation, "we can't all be bloody national heroes, eh?"

At that, Sansa's mouth drops unattractively open as it, completely belatedly, hits her who they are. Their brother Loras — Margaery's senior, Willas' junior — was a three-time Olympic gold medalist at the 1960 Summer Olympic Games in Rome, a movie-star-handsome idol at the precocious age of seventeen for an adoring Britain; Sansa herself had his photographs and press clippings pasted up on her wall. Loras Tyrell, of course…. and yet somehow the connection was never made from her childhood fancy to the girl she boards with at school. The three siblings and their other brother (Sansa recalls that there is one, but not his name) are the children of Mace Tyrell, an enormously wealthy industrialist and shipping tycoon who made his fortune rebuilding England's maritime infrastructure after the war. Out of nowhere, Sansa finds herself wondering if a match with one, nouveau-riche as they might be instead of ancient bluebloods, would please her family and quell suspicions about their loyalty… not that she's thinking so far ahead, surely that she would not be so crass as to wed a man merely for his bank account…

Willas breaks into her reverie with some jovial remark or other, and she turns her attention back to him, ever more aware of a certain rapport between them, as if Margaery and the rest of the cafe have simply ceased to exist and they are only speaking to each other. The time flies, and by noon, as he is chaperoning them out to the car, Sansa fully agrees when Margaery says, "Oh, Will, do let's not go home yet!" She is not ready to let go of this moment. Not yet.

Genially concurring, Willas drives them to the Botanic Gardens, which are somewhat deprived of their usual bloom and beauty this late in November, but they wander among the hedges and throw pebbles into the pools and soak up the thin sun. Willas gets tired quicker than the girls, and sits on a stone bench with his leg outstretched. Sansa keeps looking back, their eyes meeting in small, jarring sparks. Wherever she goes, she is conscious of him watching.

At last, the frolicking wears them out, and they make a brief stop at Merton College, bumping down the cobbles of the eponymous street, for Willas to pick up his books (he says he'll go off to Radcliffe and catch up on his reading) before he chaffeurs them back to Somerville. As he gets the door, hopping around to hold it open for her, he catches at Sansa's hand as she steps out. Voice low enough that Margaery does not hear, he murmurs, "May I see you again, Miss Stark?"

She gazes back into his eyes. Feels her stomach turn oddly. There is fear still, and hesitance, but something else as well, much stronger, deeper, sweeter, older. "Yes, Mr Tyrell," she breathes back. "Of course you may."


End file.
